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Slashdot Asks: Do You Still Use RSS?
Real Site Syndication, or RSS has been around for over a decade but it never really managed to lure regular web users (though maybe it wasn't built to serve everyone). So much so that even Google cited declining usage of Google Reader, at one time the most popular RSS reader service, as one of the two reasons for shutting down the service. With an increasingly number of people looking at Facebook and Twitter for news, we thought it would be a good time to ask the following question: Do you use any RSS reader app? If yes, do you think it is still a good way to keep track of the "new stuff" that your favorite sites publish?
When the Google reader went away I scrambled to find a replacement. Feedly is by far the best replacement of the bunch and I have paid for all their services to support them.
RSS is far from dead.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
I still use RSS for about 50 feeds with about 400 articles a day. The problem are the sources.
The quality is declining. Some feeds only deliver the teaser and a link to the article on the web site.
Even when I offer money, nearly no newspaper is able to deliver a full RSS stream :-(.
I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper.
Well, there's your problem. The idea of starting your day with a cup of coffee and a broad sample of current events has gone the way of the dodo.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is probably the single reason why FF is still my primary browser, though I'm happy with it otherwise. It's the best way to peruse headlines because you never have to visit the site. It's probably saved my eyes from more distraction than any other feature I can think of.
I think all of my podcasts come in on RSS feeds at this point. I run a video to audio conversion site for one TV program and the RSS feed is the only way anybody gets the audio (they could just play the video file if they were web-constrained).
Everybody I know who has tried serious podcatching for news has stopped listening to broadcast radio for it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
bullshit
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
bullshit
He's actually quite right. Things like Facebook and Twitter and "following", even Google Now's page. It all tracks things you like and molds to an individuals viewpoint.
Most people ARE getting a very narrow view of the world now. Gone is the broad-spectrum news that people used to get. People tailormake their news to fit their specific world-view these days.
If news doesn't fit your ideology, you don't read it.
It has led to increased polarization in the political spectrum.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Likewise, I got here via RSS.
Before I say anything else, I'll shill by tossing in a glowing recommendation for Feedbin. I tested way too many clients after Google Reader went down, and it was far and away my favorite of the bunch. As a nice bonus, it's also open source and can be run on your own servers free of charge, but I've been a paid subscriber ever since Reader shut down. Well worth the $20/year I'm paying.
Speaking more generally, the problem we all have is with surfacing the content we want to see. The content we want to see is constantly being published all around the web, but we lack the ability to know when and where it's getting published, so we need help finding it.
As of today, we have a few options. We can rely on curated content (e.g. newspapers, BuzzFeed), which waste our time and attention with copious amounts of content that we have no interest in so that we can find the few nuggets that actually interest us. Alternatively, we can rely on content aggregators (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), but content aggregation is rarely a money-maker, so each of those serves numerous other purposes (e.g. sharing jokes, posting cat pics, relaying personal messages), all of which add noise that detracts from simply consuming the news. Moreover, each of those sites interferes with the news in some ways (e.g. reordering or hiding content), making them unreliable if we want to have a holistic and accurate view of matters.
Or, as a third option, we can rely on RSS and not have to make any of those compromises.
With a newspaper or BuzzFeed, if I feel like I have to sift through too much cruft, I can either take it or leave it. But with RSS, I can effectively make my own newspaper by subscribing to exactly as many sites I want to, each of which narrowly covers a small subset of the topics I'm interested in. As a result, I have exactly as much new content as I want, and nearly each piece of new content is tailored specifically to my interests. Plus, I gain all the fine-grained controls (e.g. mark as unread, applying rules to filter news, being able to look through update statistics) that come with having technology that's dedicated to solving a specific problem, rather than being one part of a much larger, general-purpose platform like those other content aggregators.
In fact, I've become so averse to sites that waste my time that if a site that posts new content doesn't offer an RSS feed, I simply don't visit it unless someone else links me to it. Nor do I apparently miss them, as I just learned when I went through my feeds and found that about a dozen of them hadn't had any updates in years, only one of which I had noticed was missing.
And what do I do with all of that time I've saved? Waste it commenting on Slashdot, apparently.
*sigh*
I also switched to running TinyTinyRSS after Google Reader. I agree that RSS is very helpful for sites that update infrequently and/or at varied times. I also use it for frequently updated sites, it's so much faster to skim headlines and teasers with little to no ads in a feed reader; I tend to be a completist though so I have to fight the urge to skim everything.
When Twitter dropped their RSS feeds, I added a little code takes a Twitter handle as a parameter and returns their tweets as RSS (I already had the necessary API key).
Social media is so much worse for keeping track of the output of multiple sites. On one end, you have algorithms trying to decide what you want to see (or making businesses pay to be seen), on the other you have sites that send multiple tweets for the same story using different lines to "grab you."
Er, I'm using RSS in Firefox right now (it's how I found this article). 52.0.2.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.